Waiting in Hope

"It's time to wait in hope in our creative God, who in God's own time will bring us home to where we religious really belong: the new frontiers that offer hope and fresh possibility for the ever new manifestations of God's reign on earth. Homecoming, too, is what humanity today yearns for. Even the rich and powerful, who thrive on violent consumerism and aggressive competition, are not at peace with themselves nor with the world. The violent way is a pathway to nihilism, for rich and poor alike. The shalom of God calls us home to where we truly belong, in relation to self, others, and our creative universe. It is that homecoming more than anything else that must engage the vowed liminars of the future; to choose otherwise puts the liminal witness itself in perdition."
Poverty, Celibacy, and Obedience

The Limits and Possibilities of Spirituality

"As a transitional phenomenon, spirituality offers some significant namings of what has outlived its relevance in our time, and what needs to be reclaimed to empower us for the evolving future. In some ways, the reclaiming is characterized by great age and deep wisdom, radically different from the perception and denunciation of New Age weirdness."
God in the Midst of Change: Wisdom for Confusing Times

The Progression of the Catholic Church

"All the Christian Churches claim to be founded in the power of the Holy Spirit as the chief mediator of wisdom from on high. It looks like it might be the Great Spirit who is shaking the tired foundations of the Catholic Church and inaugurating a novel Catholic identity, which is as global and complex as the Spirit who blows where it wills. While Catholic leadership expends a great deal of time and energy regressing to the Roman inheritance (Latin language, etc.) the people's Church is diversifying into a new cultural entity in the Southern hemisphere, immersed in the hopes and dreams of a largely youthful population."
God in the Midst of Change: Wisdom for Confusing Times

Technology and Co-Evolution

"Technology is an integral dimension of coevolution at this time and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It is an aspect of the lure of the future that we resist to our own detriment, as intimated by the physicist Michio Kaku (2011) in a highly informed analysis. Instead, we need to embrace it, mobilizing our individual and collective resources to provide the necessary wisdom and discernment, while committing ourselves to the ongoing development of our critical and discerning faculties — combined with new social and political skills — to evolve strategies and structures that will channel this breakthrough to the benefit of person and planet alike. This indeed is a formidable and daunting undertaking, and we don't have the right to opt out. Time alone will tell if we can rise to the challenge. When it comes to adult-based faith, this is certainly a new threshold requiring a quality of resilience and wisdom largely unknown in the modern world."
The Meaning and Practice of Faith

Distrust and Creativity

"Whom Do We Trust? This is becoming an engaging and disturbing question for many contemporary adults. Among both youth and older people we experience a growing distrust of those in charge, whether in politics, economics, religion, or social policy. In our world of mass information, the human mind is sharper and more critical. So much more information is now widely available! More adults trust intuition and the creative imagination. More people want to be involved in co-creating a different — and hopefully, a better — future, not on the basis of reliable knowledge from the past, but on the basis of the amorphous wisdom that characterizes our time, despite all the contradictions and chaotic elements that belong to the awakening consciousness."
The Meaning and Practice of Faith

Creation and Desire

"Jesus took desire seriously, and wishes all Christians to do the same. We engage desire, not primarily by adopting a moralistic and legal coding, but by working co-operatively for the right relationships that facilitate liberation and growth at every level of life. Striving to get relationships right is the heart and soul of the New Reign of God. And it is not merely human relationships, but right relating at every level from the cosmos to the bacterial realm. Creation is forever held in the embrace of a relational matrix, and from that foundational source all relationships find their true place and purpose."
The Transformation of Desire: How Desire Became Corrupted — and How We Can Reclaim It

Re-connecting with Our Spiritual Landscape

"The spiritual landscape we explore is both ancient and new. For us as humans, spirituality is a natural birthright, which over the millennia has been weaving a tapestry of elegance, grandeur and beauty, with the inevitable scars of an evolving universe. At this time of global transition, we need to re-connect with that great tradition and reclaim it afresh in the context of our new evolutionary moment."
Reclaiming Spirituality

The Journey Back Home

"The new angle I wish to offer is, in fact, a very old one. I will take the story of evolution itself, with the contemporary insights and understandings on how life has been unfolding before our eyes — for many millennia, and for several billennia before we humans evolved. When we explore that story, with the aid of amulti-disciplinary hermeneutic we begin to glimpse a very different landscape, a place we recognise as being strangely familiar, a place from which we have been exiled, a place many now wish to reclaim as their true spiritual home.

"More than anything else, you need to bring an open heart and a questioning mind to the reading of this book. It is all about the bigpicture, not the punctuated developments that have cropped up here and there in the past 5,000 years — during which the formal religions came into being. Religion one time had the tools to keep us in creative balance; more accurately it provided the crucial cement for the societal bonding required by patriarchal power. It is the imminent collapse of the patriarchal system that is forcing us to re-think the whole meaning of religion and its spiritual significance in our lives.

"Today, our pilgrimage is different. The wisdom that led us into the desert places, one-time home to heroic spiritual asceticism, today is a barren bosom no longer capable of nourishing or sustaining us. The journey back home requires a whole new set of skills and learnings."
Religion in Exile: A Spiritual Homecoming

The Distraction of the Divinity of Jesus

"The divine superiority we attribute to Jesus, the understanding we painstakingly honor in worship and doctrine, may well be a major obstacle to a true following of Jesus as the Christ of faith. We condemn Jesus to divine captivity, thus obfuscating both his divinity and his humanity. In the exalted pedestal of patriarchal projection, Jesus is so divinely holy and remote that his radically new way of being human ends up in jeopardy and is seriously compromised. The power of his message is domesticated, the challenge is muted, and the glory of God fully alive in the human is overshadowed by the addictive hunger for divine power and glory. Our preoccupation with the divinity of Jesus may well be a gross distraction from really knowing who Jesus is."
Catching up with Jesus: A Gospel Story for Our Time

A Parable

"JOSHUA: In my New Reign, there is no place for dualisms. For my relational matrix, creation is one — religionists and politicians must learn to work together if true liberation is to be brought about.

BISHOP: So, in a word, do you see a future for the church?

JOSHUA: Yes, I do, vibrant communities of faith that call forth the adult in people; networks that generate hope and fresh possibility — not insipid institutions where the living Spirit is often smothered and crushed."
Catching up with Jesus: A Gospel Story for Our Time

Enlightenment in Exploration

"So the invitation is to search for the light. And the enlightenment we seek may be in the exploration rather than in the discovery. Consequently, we are invited to travel light, so that, hopefully, we are unencumbered and more favorably disposed to receive. If we can risk all, and trust the process, then the chances are we'll arrive at truth, because the mystery we move within is fundamentally benign and benevolent.
"Are you prepared to take the risk . . . ? R.S.V.P. while the daylight lasts!"
Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics

It is Time to Outgrow

"It is time to outgrow . . .

our rational anthropocentric need to impose order, structure, and closure on every sphere of experience. Our fear of wild eroticism, of creative chaos, and of the radically new possibilities often condemns us to the imprisonment of our fretful imaginations, which then drive us to impulsive action and an irrational desire to dominate and control.

"It is time to embrace . . .

horizons that stretch our minds and hearts to their very limits, trusting that the creative Spirit, who breaks down all rigid boundaries and barriers, will spearhead a new relationality in which we and every other organism will rediscover its true cosmic and planetary identity."
Evolutionary Faith

The Problem with a Humans-First Approach to Science and Theology

"I am suggesting that our inherited science and theology have been adopting a humans-first approach that seriously undermines both the grandeur of God and the elegance of creation itself. The grandeur of creation — which science and cosmology are beginning to illuminate — bequeaths to us an understanding of the Divine in which the power of Living Spirit seems to be foundational. First-nations people have long understood this insight. Has the time come to embrace it — and affirm it — more widely? How do you feel about this challenge? What are its implications for your own sense of faith and belief?"
In The Beginning Was the Spirit: Science, Religion and Indigenous Spirituality